CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“Upon my soul I’m glad I don’t know what this year is going to bring. I don’t think I ever woke on a first of January with such feelings of apprehension,” Gertrude declared at the start of 1921.
The new year began with a torrent of rain, but it wasn’t only the weather and the political situation that made her apprehensive. Except for her closest colleagues, she had very few friends. (The only woman she was close to was Aurelia Tod, the Italian wife of Lynch’s representative in Baghdad.) She cared little for socializing, and her contempt had left her without much of a personal life. Even the entertaining she did was part of her work, and guests who failed to conform to her style were simply banished from her mind. In the middle of a dinner to which she had invited one of her favorite Political Officers, Major Dickson, and his young bride, Violet, she turned to another male guest and, switching from Arabic to English, announced, “It is such a pity that promising young Englishmen go and marry such fools of women.”
“As Harold had been one of her ‘promising young Englishmen,’ ” Mrs. Dickson commented later, “I felt most uncomfortable.” To the bride, the evening was long and miserable, her hostess “rather aloof and unprepossessing.” But when Gertrude wrote home, she declared the dinner a “real success.”
Coats of numbness had hardened her. Resilient before, she was impervious now, her passions buried in the war, in the tombs of her lovers and friends and family members, her sensitivity crushed by the vicious behavior of A. T. Wilson. She protected herself as she had learned to do as a child: pushing away the pain, consuming herself in her work. It had left her bitter and lonely. On Christmas Day 1920, alone in her sitting room, she scrawled to Hugh: “As you know I’m rather friendless. I don’t care enough about people to take trouble about them and naturally enough they don’t trouble about me—why should they? Also all their amusements bore me to tears and I don’t join in them; the result is that except for the people I’m working with I see no one.”
She had been to the Coxes’ to help prepare for a dinner that night, and to the Tods’ for a Christmas tea with twenty children—English, Circassians, Jews, Christians and Arabs—all playing together “as if they had been born and bred in the same nurseries.” But joyful gatherings like the ones celebrated at Rounton were long gone; she noted that this was her eighth Christmas away from her family.
Sir Percy Cox was the steady factor in her life, the “Rock of Gibraltar,” gentle but firm, courteous but determined. She worked closely with him at the office, lunched with him every day and relaxed with him sometimes on weekends, boating, picnicking or shooting. A man of few words, he rarely spoke but listened carefully to those with something to say. Her influence over him was increasing. In fact, it was becoming so great that Philby later observed, “Gertrude Bell exercised an excessive and almost mesmeric effect on his judgment and decisions.”
The closer she was to Cox, the more jealous her colleagues became; with few exceptions, the Political Officers used every opportunity to mock her. On a day when she was having coffee with visiting sheikhs and the conversation lagged, she asked one of the Arabs how things were going in the desert. “The wind is blowing,” the sheikh replied. After he left she quickly repeated his words to the High Commissioner. But the dangerous agitation she predicted turned out to be nothing more than an actual weather report, and for a long time afterward her message was used against her. “The wind is blowing” became a regular, in-house British officers’ joke.
Reports of her brilliant opus, Review of the Civil Administration of Mesopotamia, prepared by Miss Gertrude L. Bell, C.B.E., arrived mid-January in the newspapers from home. A literary achievement as well as a factual compilation, the official, 147-page publication had been presented as a White Paper to both Houses of Parliament. Loaded with anthropological, sociological, historical and political facts, it encompassed every important personage and explained every significant event that had taken place in Mesopotamia over the course of the six years since India Expeditionary Force D had entered Basrah, in November 1914, up to the current steps to establish an Arab Government. Beginning with a description of the lax and corrupt Ottoman rule, it went on, in highly detailed and descriptive prose, to account for the British occupation during and after the war; the problems with turbulent and pro-Turkish tribes; the difficulties in winning the loyalty of the sheikhs; the disaster at Kut; the occupation of Basrah, Baghdad, Mosul and the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, with their inflammatory religious leaders; the Anglo-French Declaration and the problems the British encountered up until the time of the mandate; the organization of the Civil Administration, including the establishment of schools and a unified educational system, the building of hospitals and medical care, the creation of a judicial system, the formation of a police corps, a commercial department and tax agencies; the pacification of the tribes during the 1920 uprising; the relations with the Arabs and the Kurds; and the nationalist movement.
It had taken Gertrude the better part of a year to write, and it won accolades in England. Nevertheless, she was more than a little annoyed at the sexist tone of the praise. Intellectually, she may have viewed herself as a man and even prided herself on being accepted by men as an equal, but being a woman, a capable woman herself, was never in dispute.
She wrote home angrily: “I’ve just got Mother’s letter of December 15 saying there’s a fandango about my report. The general line taken by the press seems to be that it’s most remarkable that a dog should be able to stand up on its hind legs—i.e. a female write a white paper. I hope they’ll drop that source of wonder and pay attention to the report itself, if it will help them to understand what Mesopotamia is like.” She wanted it clearly understood that the request for the report had come directly to her from the India Office and not, as suggested on the cover page, from A. T. Wilson. Moreover, she wrote, “I insisted, very much against his will, on doing it my own way, which though it might not be a good way was at least better than his. At any rate it’s done, for good or bad, and I’m thankful I’m not in England to be exasperated by reporters.”
But other events in England soon aggravated her even more: the debate over Mesopotamia had taken a bad turn. Severe unemployment from the post war Depression had brought on a taxpayers’ revolt; the public was fed up with the expense of supporting Britain’s newly mandated areas in the Middle East. Winston Spencer Churchill, now Colonial Secretary, had suggested that, to protect the oil interests in Persia and the route from Egypt to India, the base at Basrah should be maintained. But due to the high cost of keeping troops in the region, he proposed that the British pull out of the rest of Iraq. Gertrude and Cox found the notion absurd.
“As far as statecraft I really think you might search our history from end to end without finding poorer masters of it than Lloyd George and Winston Churchill,” she scoffed to her father. She had already suffered enough from Churchill’s poor decisions: his resolve to send in troops at Gallipoli had killed Doughty-Wylie. Now she foresaw, at his whim, the destruction of Mesopotamia.
In the face of such a threat, Cox had composed a letter to Whitehall explaining the risks of abandoning Iraq and the impossibility of keeping only Basrah. At Gertrude’s urging, and in the hope of quickly establishing a solid Arab government, he suggested choosing Faisal as Emir. On the morning of Sunday, January 10, Cox called Gertrude to his house. She found him sitting in the dining room, where he handed her a telegram he had just received from Churchill. Mortified by what she read, she went home and whisked off a note to Hugh:
“EXTREMELY CONFIDENTIAL. We have reached, I fear, the end of the chapter.… H.M.G. had placed the decision as to their policy in Mesopotamia in the hands of the Secretary of State for War and he therefore informed the High Commissioner and the Commander in Chief that he could not burden the British public with the expenditure necessary to carry out the programme suggested—i.e. Sir Percy’s recent proposal that we should bring about the selection of Faisal as Emir of Iraq, that being, in his view, the one hope of establishing speedily a stable Arab Govt and reducing the British army occupation.”
It was impossible, she insisted, to establish a native government without British support. And she still chafed at Wilson, calling him the source of the problems. From the day in May when he had first spoken contemptuously of an Arab Government, she explained, the nationalists had intensifed their anti-British campaign. It was true that the idea of a jihad appealed to the masses, and the prospect of looting and not having to pay taxes inspired the tribes, but, she emphasized, “A.T. stands convicted of one of the greatest errors of policy which we have committed in Asia—an error so great that it lies on the toss of a halfpenny whether we can retrieve it.”
A few weeks later everything changed.
Pressed by the fury in England over the cost of Mesopotamia alone—twenty million pounds sterling for the year of 1920—combined with the confusion in Baghdad over who should become Emir—a son of the Sharif Hussein or Sayid Talib or even a Turkish prince—and the dilemma over what to do with Palestine and TransJordan, Churchill summoned a small group of Orientalists to Egypt. The British Empire’s best minds on the Middle East would determine the fate of Mesopotamia, TransJordan and Palestine. From England, Churchill called in Air Marshal Hugh Trenchard of the RAF; Kinahan Cornwallis, an Intelligence expert attached to the Finance Ministry in Egypt; and the newest member of his team, the fair-haired, formerly retired Arab expert Colonel T. E. Lawrence. From Palestine Churchill sent for High Commissioner Sir Herbert Samuel and Mr. Wyndham Deedes; from Aden, General Scott; from Somalia, Sir Geoffrey Archer, who brought along two baby lions destined for the Cairo zoo; from Persia, A. T. Wilson, now representing the Anglo-Persian Oil Company; from Arabia, General Ironside and Colonel Trevor. And from Mesopotamia he summoned Sir Percy Cox and the only woman among the forty official delegates, Miss Gertrude Bell.
By the middle of February Gertrude was preparing for the urgent conference in Cairo.
To represent the Iraqis, two members of the Council were picked to join the delegation: Jafar Pasha and Sasun Effendi; Sayid Talib, to his great disappointment, was kept at home. The night before they left, however, they all dined with Talib. Gertrude reported: “Amid potations of whisky he whispered in my ear in increasingly maudlin tones that he had always regarded me as his sister, always followed my advice and now saw in me his sole support and stay. And I, feeling profoundly that his ambitions never will and never should be fulfilled, could do nothing but murmur colourless expressions of friendship.” The following morning, February 24, 1921, the group was off, sailing down the Tigris, and after dinner that night, Gertrude sat down with Percy Cox, Major Eadie and Jafar Pasha for the most popular form of Baghdad evening entertainment, a game of bridge.
At Basrah, where they switched from the boat to a ship, Gertrude rushed off to see the Van Esses. A warm welcome, lunch with her friends, and the conversation turned to the rebellion still weighing heavily on their minds. For seven years John Van Ess had lived as a missionary among the Euphrates tribes that had started the 1920 uprising; he was certain, he said, that the roots of the revolt were not in a struggle for nationalism but in a war of religion, an ongoing battle between Shiites and Sunnis. He had supported Wilson’s harshest measures and, even less to Gertrude’s liking, was a fan of Sayid Talib. Nevertheless, she appreciated hearing his analyses. “There’s no one better to talk to than Mr. Van Ess,” she wrote to Florence.
As the Mesopotamian delegation sailed to Egypt on the Hardinge, Winston Churchill walked briskly past the crowds at Victoria Station, and slipping into his private compartment on the boat train, he lighted a cigar and set to work. “I’m going to save you millions,” the Colonial Secretary had promised the press. Only a few days before he had noted to Parliament that the great success of the Allies in World War I, the break-up of the Ottoman Empire and the consequent possession by the British of Palestine and Mesopotamia had pushed England into a situation of enormous responsibility. It had come at a high price, he told them: twenty-five million pounds just to fight the rebellions and ward off anarchy and chaos in the Mandates. Now he would do something to cut the cost. He would establish an Arab Government in Mesopotamia and ease the burden on the British public.
Gertrude stood in her striped silk dress and silver fox boa, looking out from beneath her flowered hat, and in the hall of the familiar Cairo train station she spotted her old chum Lawrence, come to meet them. With the huge success of Lowell Thomas’s lectures and the publication of Thomas’s book, Lawrence of Arabia, T.E.L. had become world famous; for the first time since they met, he was more well known than Gertrude. “Dear Boy,” she cried out, extending her gloved hand to the shy and awkward fellow. “Gertie,” he greeted her and looked around. “Everyone Middle East is here,” he said.
A horse-drawn carriage took them to the palm-fringed Corniche, the road overlooking the Nile, and on the way they could hear Islamic students from al Ahzar University chanting anti-British slogans. Inside the Semiramis Hotel, a sense of expectation fluttered through the lobby. For days the staff had bustled about, feverishly polishing brass, watering potted palm trees and flowering plants, readying rooms, scurrying across the marble floors delivering telegrams, carrying hatboxes, toiletry cases and steamer trunks, ushering in a glittering array of distinguished guests.
Gertrude led Lawrence to her room. During the 1920 uprising in Mesopotamia and the debate over the cost of the mandate, Lawrence had written letters to the British press, sometimes praising, more often condemning the work of the civil administration in Baghdad. “I’m largely in agreement,” Gertrude had written back to him at first. But as the weeks wore on, his criticism grew more hostile. “The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour,” he wrote unfairly in The Sunday Times. “Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows.” Gertrude responded angrily, rightly describing his ideas as “tosh” and “pure nonsense.” Now the pair enjoyed “a private laugh over two of her letters, one,” Lawrence explained, “describing me as an angel, and the other accusing me of being possessed by the devil.”
They discussed the costs of Mesopotamia and the need to withdraw some troops, and they agreed that, with an Arab Government installed, Great Britain could begin to decrease the size and expenditures of its administration. Most important of all, in the confines of the Semiramis Hotel they conspired over Faisal as the future ruler of Iraq. Lawrence had already smoothed the way with Churchill in London, and Gertrude had done the same with Cox in Baghdad; now they would work together to make sure the man they wanted was anointed Emir. An hour later they emerged from her room, and while Lawrence drifted off, Gertrude went with Sir Percy to pay a courtesy call on the Churchills. The following day, Saturday, March 12, 1921, cloaked in a shroud of secrecy, with not a single word to the press, the Cairo Conference officially opened.
“I’ll tell you about our Conference,” Gertrude wrote to Florence two weeks later. “It has been wonderful. We covered more work in a fortnight than has ever before been got through in a year. Mr. Churchill was admirable, most ready to meet everyone halfway and masterly alike in guiding a big political meeting and in conducting small political committees into which we broke up.”
On the first day of the sessions, as the Political Committee convened at the table, Gertrude puffing on her cigarette, Churchill puffing on his cigar, Percy Cox described the events in Baghdad over the past five months: a Provisional Government had been established, and the Naqib invited to form a Cabinet. Now without delay, he said, an announcement had to be made that a new authority would soon replace the provisional Council of State. The delegates concurred that the new authority must be an individual ruler. But who? The Naqib of Baghdad was mentioned, and the names of Sayid Talib, the Sheikh of Muham-marah, even a relative of the Turkish Sultan were tossed around; almost without argument, they were dropped. With the McMahon-Hussein promises of an Arab kingdom for the Sharifian family still hanging over them like a cloud of conscience, the best choice, the group agreed, was a son of the Sharif.
But why, Churchill demanded to know, would Faisal, the younger son, be better than his older brother, Abdullah?
Cox explained that it was important to establish an Arab army to control any incipient rebellions; Faisal’s experience in leading the desert revolt, and his involvement with the Allied army under Allenby, made him better qualified than Abdullah. The fact that Faisal was no longer in Damascus made him available. That he had been let down by the British did not need to be said.
The conversation moved around the table. “The first ruler should be an active and inspiring personality,” Lawrence observed. It was important to have a charismatic figure to “counteract the claims of rival candidates and pull together the scattered elements of a backward and half-civilized country.” Abdullah, he added, “was lazy and by no means dominating.”
Churchill pointed out that choosing Faisal to lead Iraq would give the British some leverage over the rest of the Sharifian family. If Faisal knew that his own behavior (that is, his cooperating with the British) affected not only his father’s subsidy and the protection of the holy places from attacks by Ibn Saud, but also influenced the position of his brother Abdullah in TransJordan, he would be much easier to deal with. And his father and brother, in turn, would also behave in acceptable ways.
Gertrude acknowledged that if Faisal were chosen, they might encounter opposition from Sayid Talib. He was, after all, one of the most powerful men in Iraq. But, she assured the group, it would be negligible compared to the acclamation Faisal would receive.
By the end of the day, as Gertrude had hoped, they voted in favor of Faisal. Churchill cabled home: “Prospects Mesopotamia promising.” The Sharif’s son Faisal, he wrote, offered “hope of best and cheapest solution.”
Gertrude had changed her opinion completely about Winston Churchill. And no wonder: the meetings had gone almost exactly according to her plan. It was she who had set her sights on Faisal as King of the new Arab state; it was she who had fought to include the vilayets of Basrah, Baghdad and Mosul, and to embrace Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds; it was she who had decided the borders and drawn the lines in the sand around Iraq. All that she had envisioned was beginning to take shape.
At the following session Gertrude and Lawrence laid out plans for bringing Faisal to Iraq. As a Sunni ruler in a country with a Shiite majority, Faisal would have to base his legitimacy on his Sharifian roots; he was, most important, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. Thus, they explained to Churchill, although the Emir was currently in London, he would need to travel to Mecca, the birthplace of Muhammad, the holiest site in Islam and the symbol of Faisal’s religious importance. There it would be announced that Faisal had been invited by the Iraqi people, and as he journeyed from Mecca, north toward Baghdad, Gertrude felt sure that, with help from British and Arab sympathizers, support for him would snowball.
The Iraqi delegates, Jafar Pasha al Askari and Sasun Effendi Eskail, were called into the room and asked what they thought. As Gertrude knew they would (she had already spent hours with them discussing this very same subject), the two men wholeheartedly agreed with the decision.
At further conference sessions, debates ensued over Mosul, the Kurds and the costly size of the British military presence. When they turned to the turbulent area in the north of Iraq, Churchill proposed autonomy; a Kurdish region would serve as a buffer zone between the Arabs and the Turks. He feared that an Iraqi ruler might “ignore Kurdish sentiment and oppress the Kurdish minority.” Gertrude disagreed. The north was too important to Iraq, she insisted: Mosul not only had oil; it had long been the breadbasket of Mesopotamia, its fertile soil providing grain for the entire country. Moreover, its population provided a substantial number of badly needed Sunnis to counterbalance the Shiite majority. As for the Kurds (who were also Sunnis), she believed that within six months they would be eager to join the Arab Government. But Lawrence objected: the Kurds should not be placed under an Arab Government, he warned. The issue was left in abeyance; for the immediate future, Kurdistan would be kept separate, overseen by the High Commissioner.
In the midst of the week-long debate, Lawrence, who had been on his best behavior, began to revert to his old ways. When, becoming obstreperous, he made an impudent remark, no one knew what to say. Finally, Gertrude shot him a look with her piercing eyes. She brooked no insolence. “You little IMP!” she jeered. His ears and face turned red, and Lawrence, rarely if ever taken aback, retreated in silence.
A discussion arose on the annual allowances paid to influential Arab chiefs to keep them loyal to Britain. The subsidy for Fahad Bey, whose desert provided landing strips for airplanes and roadways for the motor cars traveling between Palestine and Iraq, was kept at thirty-six thousand pounds. The Sharif Hussein of the Hejaz was to receive one hundred thousand pounds, and although Cox pushed for more for Ibn Saud, who had received sixty thousand pounds, he was to be given the same amount as Hussein. But, it was agreed, Ibn Saud would receive his raise only if he promised to stop his warring campaign against Hussein, make peace with the Shammar tribe on the southern border of Iraq and avoid the threat of war with the Emirate of Kuwait.
The troubling size of the British military presence was high on Churchill’s list. Churchill (who still retained the title of Air Minister) believed that through the use of airplanes instead of land troops, Iraq could be controlled at less expense and in a more efficient manner. Furthermore, the same air bases used in Iraq could provide a strategic link to India. Since the British army would be replaced by both the Royal Air Force and an Arab army, and since they would have armoured cars and an effective Intelligence system, British interests would still be secure. As for the Kurds: the members of the conference were all sure that air power and a few squadrons overhead would be enough to contain the rebellious tribes.
The last item on the Mesopotamian agenda, once again, was Faisal and the timing of his entry into Iraq; it was agreed that he should be invited to Baghdad before the Iraqi elections for a ruler took place. Churchill wired home: “Both Cox and Miss Bell agree that if procedure is followed, appearance of Faisal in Mesopotamia will lend to his general adoption.” But it would be tricky business to make the Iraqis believe that Faisal was their personal candidate and not the proxy of the British.
Decisions still had to be made on the remaining mandates of Palestine and TransJordan and on the rest of the Sharifian family. Hussein, who had already declared himself a king and was considered “tyrannical,” “autocratic” and greedy by the British, and his son Ali were left to rule in the Hejaz (although they would be driven out within four years by Ibn Saud); Abdullah was awarded TransJordan, the Arab area that stretched from the east bank of the Jordan river to the western border of Iraq (and where his grandson King Hussein rules today); and although Churchill supported the Balfour Declaration, the fate of Palestine was left ambiguous.
Taking a break from the wearying sessions, the peripatetic Churchill could not resist a trip to the Pyramids. Gertrude, invited to join him, climbed onto a waiting camel at Giza, but Churchill was a mass of sliding gelatin as he struggled onto the wooden saddle resting atop the hump. The animal rose from its knees, and as the bulbous Churchill reached for the thin cord, the camel lurched. Churchill fell to the ground. “How easily the mighty are fallen!” his wife, Clementine, chided. But when a horde of Egyptian riders rushed forward to offer their horses, the stubborn Churchill brushed them away. “I started on a camel and I shall finish on a camel,” he growled. A little later, with the Sphinx behind them, the group sat poised on their camels, Gertrude flanked by Churchill and Lawrence, as they posed for one the few photographs taken at the conference.
In the evenings, she and the others dashed from one social event to the next. Her father had come out to Egypt to see her, and with Hugh as her escort, Gertrude went off to a tea at Shepheard’s arranged by a visiting sheikh and to a banquet at Gezira Palace given by King Fuad. They waltzed at a ball at High Commissioner Allenby’s residence and dined at the Semiramis Hotel, where their host was Herbert Samuel, the High Commissioner of Palestine, and on the last evening, they celebrated at a banquet at Abdin Palace. The Sultan’s home was an enchanted city with acres of luxurious gardens, private living quarters complete with sunken tubs in gilded bathrooms, and a samalek, where the royal ladies received their guests. In the palace’s great Byzantine hall, the forty delegates, now called jokingly by Churchill “the forty thieves,” clinked their glasses and dined in splendor, enjoying their great success.
The Cairo Conference ended on March 25, 1921. A triumphant Churchill would soon tell Parliament that he had achieved what he had set out to do in Mesopotamia: the British garrisons would be reduced from thirty-three battalions to twenty-three battalions; expenditures would be dropped by five million pounds the first year and by twelve million pounds the next; communications lines would be installed and strategic air routes created to connect and strengthen the entire Empire.
Always a loner, Lawrence had written to his brother only a few days before the end of the conference: “It has been one of the longest fortnights I ever lived.… We lived in a marble and bronze hotel, very expensive and luxurious—horrible place: makes me Bolshevik.”
But Gertrude had had a marvelous time. Now, sitting on deck in the open air on the boat back to Iraq, she scrawled a letter to her friend Frank Balfour. She had been so pleased to see her father, she told him, and felt sad that she would not see him again for another year. Nevertheless, she wrote: “When we get our Amir he will need a great deal of help and guidance and it’s more than I could bear not to be there to give whatever hand I can. Oh Frank, it’s going to be interesting!” Almost everything she had wished for now had a chance of coming true. The country would consist of all three vilayets—Baghdad, Basrah and Mosul; the Sunnis, Shiites, Jews, Christians and Kurds would be united under a Sharifian king; and Iraq, rich, prosperous and led by Faisal, would prove a loyal protégé of Britain. If Gertrude could bring it all off, it would be more than interesting; it would be a model for the entire Middle East.